{"id":37791,"date":"2017-11-07T09:17:15","date_gmt":"2017-11-07T15:17:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=37791"},"modified":"2018-09-19T09:18:22","modified_gmt":"2018-09-19T15:18:22","slug":"in-a-pretty-good-place-kristina-lenzi-embraces-life-and-art-at-middle-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/in-a-pretty-good-place-kristina-lenzi-embraces-life-and-art-at-middle-age\/","title":{"rendered":"In a Pretty Good Place: Kristina Lenzi Embraces Life and Art at Middle Age"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo by Simon Blundell.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Kristina Lenzi is finding middle age a pretty good place to be. \u201cI\u2019m a private person,\u201d she says as we sit across a table in the Poor Yorick studio she moved into just a couple weeks prior. \u201cI\u2019m horrifically shy. On the other hand, I\u2019m a mature woman who doesn\u2019t have to succumb to being shy. I love music . . . I\u2019m an optimist and I\u2019m a feminist. I\u2019m queer. I\u2019m a teacher, a family person, a friend. I like to think that I have a pretty damned good sense of humor.\u201d<\/h4>\n

At 51, Lenzi is a longtime adjunct professor at the University of Utah and Weber State University who likes to tell jokes in class, \u201cbut I\u2019ve had to back off a bit because a couple years ago I was telling my students a joke that involved Richard Nixon and I realized, oh my god, none of them know who Richard Nixon\u00a0i<\/em>s \u2014 so now I have to let them inform how I create humor.\u201d The music you hear coming out of her studio also places her squarely in Generation X: \u201cI love David Bowie. I love Annie Lennox. I love U2. I love pop \u201870s, \u201880s, \u201890s music and it keeps me going and I listen to it all the time,\u201d she says.<\/h4>\n

In addition to the inevitable boom box, the new studio contains a large Kermit frog that came from D.I. and was the subject of a series of abstract work some years back; Yoda lurks atop some shelves covered with pastels and other materials that also hold some technical books on design and perspective. Her favorite quote hangs on a nearby wall:<\/h4>\n

This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair. No place for self-pity. No need for silence. No room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.\u00a0<\/em>\u2013 Toni Morrison<\/h4>\n
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A small round table in a corner boasts a stack of books including the red Lee Deffebach 1993 retrospective catalog, a Tufts University booklet (where Lenzi got her MFA in painting and performance art under Marilyn Arsem), a tome titled\u00a0Action\/Abstraction<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Final Light,\u00a0<\/em>Frank McEntire\u2019s 2013 collection of essays on Doug Snow from the U of U Press.\u00a0 While she respects and admires Deffebach\u2019s work, Lenzi says fervently, \u201cIf I could paint like Doug Snow and have it be my own way that would be the quintessential painting for me. He\u2019s my favorite painter. He\u2019s my\u00a0favorite<\/em>\u00a0painter.\u201d<\/h4>\n

It\u2019s a neat and tidy space not because Lenzi just moved there but because she tends to keep things that way, \u201cso that when I come in I\u2019m not overwhelmed with anything.\u00a0 And I can just start painting. Like my brain. I keep it tidy and I don\u2019t have to worry about being overwhelmed with anything, any chaos when I start painting.\u201d She has shared studio space with Julie Tippets for 11 years now, first at Rockwood, then briefly at Artspace Commons, again at Rockwood and now at Poor Yorick. \u201cIt\u2019s nice to have a community of artists, I think,\u201d says Lenzi, who got her BFA with Poor Yorick owner Brad Slaugh at the U. in 1997. There, influential professors were Sam Wilson, Stephen Goldsmith and Maureen O\u2019Hara Ure.<\/h4>\n
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Photo by Simon Blundell.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Oil and performance are her favorite mediums. \u00a0\u201cI\u2019ve been doing performance work about being a middle-aged woman,\u201d she says about current works in progress. At 6-foot-1 and with very long hair, she\u2019s used to being noticed, but things have changed as she\u2019s entered middle age. \u201cWhat\u2019s interesting to me now is that I\u2019m not noticed very much. I could go do unconscionable things in public and not be noticed,\u201d she notes sardonically.\u00a0<\/strong>She hopes to be a contender for the next UMOCA residency program to develop her ideas.<\/h4>\n

She has just finished painting (in acrylic, because \u201coil is expensive when you paint large like I do\u201d) for her show,\u00a0Alien Matters<\/em>, opening Nov. 11 at the Gallery at Library Square. The intriguing canvases, in two series, stacked neatly in the studio, are shaped by Abstract Expressionism (or AbEx, as Lenzi persistently terms it), Utah landscapes, and her love of science fiction.<\/h4>\n
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Photo by Simon Blundell.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

What she particularly likes in the new show is that she went into the Main Library and asked which two walls she was going to get and made paintings that would fit the length of each. She\u2019s excited to see how it looks once the show is up. \u201cThey tell me I\u2019m the first person who has used the space in that way,\u201d Lenzi states.<\/h4>\n

\u201cOnce I\u2019m done with a painting I\u2019m just done. It\u2019s the process that counts to me,\u201d Lenzi observes. \u201cBut I\u2019m pretty attached to the conceptual part of this show, or at least I was when I did the work. The idea is to paint in an Abstract Expressionist way what I feel when I go into different Utah landscapes and then to add something to it that\u2019s sort of informed by my love of science fiction.\u201d In many of the works, she explains, dark spheres act as aliens, while others get a turquoise thread of paint, \u201cperhaps water,\u201d and some evidence of alien life. \u201cSo I want to impose something otherworldly, or move it from this big joke of everything is AbEx right now, so how do I turn that into something a little more current.\u201d<\/h4>\n

\"\"<\/a>Her taste in sci-fi is classic, for the most part: all of Asimov\u2019s novels; Philip K. Dick, and especially, she says,\u00a0Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep<\/em>, a work from the \u201860s that inspired the Blade Runners\u2019 films (also faves of hers). She currently is reading Kim Stanley Robinson\u2019s\u00a0Mars Trilogy<\/em>and liked Blake Crouch\u2019s recent\u00a0Dark Matter.<\/em><\/h4>\n

The great- great- granddaughter of noted Utah artist Martin Lenzi (from whom family members say she got her talent) the artist describes herself as a painter who loves performance art. Though her resume is split pretty evenly between both kinds of exhibitions, Lenzi says, \u201cI love paint. I love everything about it. I love how it moves. Every time you do a painting you learn something new.\u201d Her mother told her she was prolific at 3. \u201cIt\u2019s in my baby book. I\u2019ve always had to do it,\u201d Lenzi states.<\/h4>\n

In fifth grade she stopped copying Dennis the Menace and started taking art lessons at her mother\u2019s insistence. \u201cI had to take piano lessons until I was 16 and can\u2019t play a note, but mother recognized that I was doing this other thing that was artistic so I studied under Robert Rumel for a while.\u00a0 He was having me draw still life from other sources, teaching me realism. As soon as I got into junior high, Marjorie McClure was a big influence, then Doug Allen at Alta High.\u201d She was a Sterling Scholar in Visual Art (though she could have chosen Spanish) and was in the Springville Museum High School Show for several years. Lenzi was a fast-pitch softball pitcher and says that strategy involved the kind of thinking she uses in painting all the time. She has two younger brothers who are both produce managers: \u201cI\u2019m the odd one.\u201d<\/h4>\n
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After working in the mental-health field for a long time as a psychiatric technician and briefly as a case manager after college, Lenzi decided that wasn\u2019t what she wanted to pursue. So, naturally, she went to grad school. \u201cI taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and then moved back here.\u201d Her family is here; her partner of almost 13 years, a legal mediator, is here. \u201cThis is home base,\u201d Lenzi says.<\/h4>\n

Since being in Salt Lake City makes it expensive to travel to see all the performance artists she is interested in, Lenzi decided to bring them to her. Last month, the Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival brought 12 artists from around the world to the Salt Lake City Main Library for two days of performances during its fifth annual event.\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s really taken off,\u201d she says of the festival she created, noting that in the United States, Chicago is the only other city with an international performance art festival.<\/h4>\n

Using the entire downtown library as a stage and frequently involving unsuspecting patrons for an audience, performers like Boston\u2019s Marilyn Arsem might do a piece like \u201cLost Words,\u201d where, in 2013, armed with a hundred-year-old dictionary, she asked passersby if they had \u201clost any words?\u201d and then gave them one (such as \u201cpruinose\u201d) to bring back into common circulation. \u00a0Also at that festival Lenzi, outfitted appropriately, \u201cfished\u201d for walkers in the atrium below with gummy- worm bait \u2014 to critical delight. In 2014, Montreal artist Stephane Gilots had the audience become performers in a piece called \u201cStation Library\u201d by donning his handmade space suit to search the library for a book on the subject of space from a list he had created.<\/h4>\n

Because she\u2019s so painfully shy, Lenzi says going into a performance is torture. \u201cBut you do it because you have this concept and you feel like the message has to be conveyed. Afterwards, it just feels so good that you got through it and you learn so much about yourself just getting through that I think it\u2019s made me less shy,\u201d she observes.<\/h4>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u201cAt heart I\u2019m a painter and when I do performance it\u2019s a lot like painting. The audience is there and I\u2019m the canvas. This last piece I did at the festival at the beginning of October, I threw multicolored rose petals at the audience over the ledges of the library and it just felt like throwing paint at a canvas except I had an audience responding immediately \u2014 and that\u2019s the difference. \u201c<\/h4>\n

Lenzi likes to draw. \u201cI\u2019m good at it. But I think I moved into this more sloppy approach to painting, this kind of abstraction stuff, because drawing tends to be really tight.\u201d On her website you\u2019ll find a series of political drawings of large heads on little bodies. \u201cI can whip those out in a couple hours, but I don\u2019t want to spend hours and hours drawing,\u201d she concedes. \u00a0\u201cNow that I\u2019ve moved back into oil painting, I just completed two large tighter works, tighter in that they are not exactly representational so they are still coming out of my imagination but are coming out of a feeling of Utah nature, a feeling of place, and I\u2019m thinking about color and what it feels like and the concept is to try to capture what that place would look like if you just blinked. That\u2019s where I\u2019m headed. They are intellectually really hard because it\u2019s about color theory and memory and sensation. Hopefully, I\u2019ll get better at it. I go to Moab every New Year\u2019s Day and spend a week. I think it was all of those visits and wanting to paint what it felt like and my love of color theory and my respect and admiration and love of Doug Snow [that triggered the new works].\u201d<\/h4>\n

\"\"<\/a>As exciting as making artwork can be, life has taught Lenzi that its richness can be mined in various ways. She and her partner together have trained a rescue dog named Janey, an Australian Shepherd (\u201cso she\u2019s smarter than I am\u201d), to work as a therapy animal in the burn unit at the U Hospital as well as in the waiting room where people are waiting for loved ones to come out of surgery. \u201cShe has compassion you wouldn\u2019t believe. With little kids in the burn unit she would stand there and just let them pet her. She\u2019s a working dog so I bring her into the studio so she doesn\u2019t go nuts staying at home,\u201d says Lenzi.<\/h4>\n

Her other hobby resulted from the recent acquisition of a turntable: she hunts vinyl at estate and yard sales. She\u2019s gotten the Police, old Talking Heads, the Clash, Dead Kennedys. Even some Barbra she can\u2019t seem to trade with anyone anywhere.\u00a0 The only rule is she can\u2019t buy any vinyl she already has on CD. \u201cI just got a Peter Frampton,\u201d Lenzi says. \u201cI never would have done that, but it was 25 cents.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Besides teaching at the U (now in the architecture department) and at Weber, she sometimes fills in here and there by doing \u201ca little substitute teaching or babysitting or house sitting or yard sitting or whatever. It covers expenses but it doesn\u2019t make me rich,\u201d she says. Lenzi even has the occasional paint party, listed on her website, where she puts up a picture for everyone to paint, they drink some wine and have fun. \u201cIt\u2019s for people who don\u2019t really care that much about art. They learn a little something and have a good time.\u00a0 I don\u2019t do a lot of them, but I\u2019ve gotten a couple of students out of those,\u201d she says with more of a giggle than a laugh. She even acknowledges having a pet painting party once in a very great while. \u00a0They paint from photographs. \u201cI really do need to update my website,\u201d she says.<\/h4>\n
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Photo by Simon Blundell<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Overall, Kristina Lenzi is in a pretty good place these days. \u201cI know enough now not to be worried about the drama of life. I\u2019m out of school; I have a career; I\u2019m pretty confident about what I do as an artist; I have friends. My body\u2019s going to crap, but other than that I think emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, everything is just kind of understood.\u201d<\/h4>\n

\u201cAlien Matters,\u201d paintings by Kristina Lenzi and \u201cMorning Walk: Sculptures by David N. LeCheminant\u201d, Salt Lake City Main Library, through Jan. 5, opening reception Nov. 11, 4 p.m. -5:30 p.m.http:\/\/www.slcpl.org\/events\/view\/7218\/<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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Photos by Simon Blundell<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photo by Simon Blundell. Kristina Lenzi is finding middle age a pretty good place to be. \u201cI\u2019m a private person,\u201d she says as we sit across a table in the Poor Yorick studio she moved into just a couple weeks prior. \u201cI\u2019m horrifically shy. On the other hand, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":844,"featured_media":37792,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[325],"class_list":["post-37791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-bytes","tag-kristina-lenzi"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/KristinaLenzi-84-1200x800.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-24 19:22:30","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/844"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37791"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37791\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37793,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37791\/revisions\/37793"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}